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Category: Ideas

If I have learned anything over two decades of youth work within the church environment it is that that the church is one of the most unproductive places on earth. Yes, I said it. If you are a youth worker, think about your day today, or yesterday, while at the

A while back we talked up the need to set up some goals in our ministry. I was thinking about how many of us have a job description that actually reflects what are jobs are about? Chances are our job description was made up of a group of people who volunteer in the

It’s the beginning of the year which is always a good time think about long term goals. What goals do you have for your ministry this year? This month? For the next 5 years? I am not a big mission statement person, those generally are too loaded or too vague

Let’s face it, youth are not hanging out on Facebook anymore, so all that time we spend there is probably now just for the parents. But they are spending their time in their phones, texting and sending pictures to each other. So why not promote your next youth event with

Stumbled upon this series of youth ministry lectures at Yale Divinity School today. Some quality youth ministry thinking captured here. NOTE: It isn’t the biggest of deals, but you might want to skip past the introductions, if you’ve ever been to an academic keynote you will know that the proper

See what I did there? I’ve gone on a bit here and other places grousing about the lack of a standard of youth ministry, particularly within the UMC. “Particularly” because I’m in the UMC, not because they’re worse than anybody else about it. It irritates the hell out of me.

Have a growing population of homeschooling teenagers? I know we certainly do. Perhaps you have seen some of the videos out there that bring into question todays education system. Perhaps you have read something like Drive by Dan Pink and checked out our Motivation 3.0 in Youth Ministry and

Throughout the history of education (no doubt this ends in an over-summation) the current generation has buckled at the knees in an effort to hand down a set of knowledge to the next generation. “Here is what we’ve learned,” we tell them. “You learn it too, then we’ll all know.”

Facebook is becoming passe’ and image driven communication is an absolute must with teenagers today. One of the growing social networks for teen use is Instagram. So how can we use Instagram for our youth ministry? Here is one way to use it for sending out news messages about youth.

Had an interesting conversation a few months back. We were planning our confirmation process (which we will highlight later at a later date). There were almost no sign ups, even though we had a few years worth of teenagers who had missed out on confirmation (due to leadership changes over

If you are like me you look at your gathered group of teenagers having a discussion or talk and see a constant drop of the eyes into the screen of the cell phone. Could be a text, most likely a text. Could even be them reading the bible, not often

Whatever the time of year it is in youth ministry there is always a need to have some youth group games you can pull out at a moments notice. One of my all time favorite youth group games is one I call “Identity Crisis”. You can pull this out in

Looking for a no set up youth devotion that quite possibly will be the hardest devotion ever? This is for you then. The Wesleyan movement that became Methodism / Wesleyanism and other faith expressions of today, had a few key practices that helped to facilitate the revival led by John